I am new to salt water and bought a 14 gallon Oceanic Biocube last month. It has been set up and cycling since then. It has been hard to leave it alone, but I bought an API Salt water testing kit and the water tests have been coming out perfect for the last week. So i decided to add a clean-up crew since it has developed a good amount of green algae for them to snack on. I thought I would start small and bought 2 blue-legged hermit crabs. The guy at the store said.. "I will give you some extra shells since they like to change.." I know they like to change shells, I already bought a bunch of them offline to prepare. At anyrate, once I was in the car on the way home I realized that some of the shells were moving. Granted all of the shells were moving.. So now instead of 2 blue legged hermit crabs I got.. 7. Ugh... They are all very small and can't be in shells larger then a 1/3 inch.. Like i said i have plenty of green algae.. I don't know if that many in such a small tank will become a circus. Should I take some back? Or will they eventually kill each other off so I have only a couple? What do you guys think?
They will be OK. Seven in your 14 gal is not too many. There may be some predation but that is normal. Enjoy them.
Welcome to TR and thanks for bringing your concern to us. The sign of a wise woman.
Dick
__________________ Amphibious
Reaching my 70th BD, I realize that I cannot help but grow old. However, I refuse to grow up!!! My wife would tell you, "He may be 70 but, He's going on 17". Life is wonderful with a woman like that.
Well overnight they seemed to have cleared a lot of the algae on the live rock. I am going to wait to see if they will clean up some more. I think I will just leave them in there for a while.. If they get too out of hand I will give some to one of my friends that have a larger salt water tank. Thank you all for your advice. I am a geek and excited about this so I made a small sucky video to show my other fish friend at work.
The Blue Legged remain small. You will be fine with the amount you have. Enjoy them.
__________________ Amphibious
Reaching my 70th BD, I realize that I cannot help but grow old. However, I refuse to grow up!!! My wife would tell you, "He may be 70 but, He's going on 17". Life is wonderful with a woman like that.
dont worry 7 is no problem. I had about 100 in my 46g. You can drop in small bits of silversides if you want. I used to stick an entire silver side in the sand and watch the crabs come. It was pretty cool. Within 2 hours the entire fish was gone
I have about ten blue legs in my 50 gallon but the only thing I dont like is that mine tend to go after the snails that are flipped upside down. I have plenty of empty shells but they love the shells that have snails in them.
So I find myself once and a while looking for an snails that are upside down and fixing them.
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